TransUnion (NYSE:TRU) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Chris just covered several of them when he went through the global enablement platforms, and I think those areas really underscore the investments that we make to make certain that TransUnion is a growing and resilient company in the future.

Operator: The next question is from Faiza Alwy of Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Faiza Alwy: Yes, hi, good morning. Thank you. I wanted to pick up on the Neustar commentary. Chris, I think I heard you say that your Neustar revenues are derisked as we think about 2023. Maybe give us a little bit more perspective around that. And how do you additional sort of big wins as we look at 2023? And perhaps you can give us some commentary around your perspective on market share in that business. Are some of these new wins related to market share? Or is it more €“ just more demand for some of the analytics that you’re able now provide? Thanks.

Christopher Cartwright: Well, just a quick comment on market share, I think it’s difficult for us to comment on our relative market share with regard to Neustar marketing services at this point generally, there are more competitors, it’s more fragmented. However, in my comments, I did highlight a series of very attractive wins that as we scored in this past year as well as pointing out that, that Fortune top 10 customer has been onboarding or did and the revenues are ramping. And so, look, I think those are good examples of competitive success in the market, and I would expect those to keep coming. Look, thinking about Neustar in a bit more detail. ’21 was a very growthful year for Neustar. They did 8% organic and change. We expected that level of growth going into ’22.

What we were surprised by is that the foundation of growth in ’21 was on an elevated level of e-commerce activity during the pandemic that dipped and as a result, midyear, we lowered our guide. We also had some of the normal, I’d say, integration growing pains in the early part of the year. But pretty quickly, all of that started to gel together and we began executing well on the sales side. And in each passing quarter, over the course of ’22, we sold more, we sold more broadly and we built really nice momentum going into ’23. And look, the 8% organic growth in the fourth quarter of last year for Neustar, it’s important because that comes on top of 9% organic growth roughly the prior year, right? So it’s growth over a meaningful comparison and then you get to ’23.

Now look, derisk in such a risky environment, is always a difficult term to address. And I’m only half kidding here. The fact is we got great momentum, we had a big year of sales, we’ve got probably higher line of sight to the 8% growth than we typically would coming into the New Year and I feel like we’re just getting our rhythm, our mojo, if you will, in terms of cross-selling Neustar products across all of our verticals. So that’s my two cents about the sales and revenue momentum at Neustar. I’d also point out that the product integration has gone really well. It’s going very well in terms of getting TransUnion data into the OneID database that underpins all of Neustar’s identity resolution for marketing and fraud, I think we got further faster than we expected.